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Friday Five

Good questions this week. [FridayFive.org]

1. What do you most want to be remembered for?

I want to be remembered as the guy that helped people when they had little nagging questions, had a joke ready at the appropriate times, and was above all else, reliable and trustworthy.

2. What quotation best fits your outlook on life?

I GOTTA BELIEVE! Seriously, look at PaRappa. He always had insurmountable problems in his life, but when he put on that damn hat and put his mind to things, everything was solved – normally with a fun rap. Essentially, if you believe in yourself, you can get anything you want done.

3. What single achievement are you most proud of in the past year?

I’m very proud that despite everything that happened before hand, Katie and I managed not to be mentioned in the news for a brutal double homicide/suicide right before the wedding.

4. What about the past ten years?

While the above is a close second, I’d have to say surviving Cornell.

5. If you were asked to give a child a single piece of advice to guide them through life, what would you say?

I’d tell him in life that the point of life is not to constantly be wrapped up in self-hatred, stress, doubt, and conflict – but to making yourself and others happy. So keep your priorities straight, never get bogged down in fear and loathing, and always eat a shitload of candy.

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Touches Of Art

Got two links that need pimping.

First, Brian Witkowski has an enjoyable photo gallery of things from his everyday life; I recommend the greyscale and the nil lumina artwork in particular.

Second, Benjamin Birdie left me a comment today, and under bloglaw, I went to his website and promptly discovered an amazing treasure trove of content. Not only is his comic, Genre City, excellent beyond belief, but he’s got some genius short stories. I can’t get over the ‘Rolling’ series – where he takes a New York Lotto Cashword card, and makes a coherent short story out of it.

Both will be appearing on the blogroll once I finish reorganizing it again.

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Debated Found

A Different Take on iTunes 4.0.1

Looking around at the headlines on various blog friends…

“iTunes 4.0.1 Goes Straight To The Top Of My ‘Blow Me” List’ – Corey Tamas

“iTunes 4.0.1 = ass” – Peter Cohen

…you’d think Apple has pulled the biggest boner in history with iTunes 4.0.1.

For you non-Mac users (and it’s required by bloglaw that I describe the situation), iTunes 4.0 had the ability to stream music over the Internet, as a offshoot feature from the Rendezvous sharing. The community bit into this like a rabid dog, and immediate there were twenty ways to steal MP3s via this manner, never mind huge listings of places you can stream off of people. iTunes 4.0.1’s biggest change is that you can only stream off of people on your subnet.

Before I start off on my little anti-anti-Apple rant, let me just say that I agree with Peter that it’s silly to try and use technology to police human nature. And I agree with Corey that Apple trying to push this as some sort of great, positive upgrade is hugely boneheaded.

But honestly, what’s the option for Apple here? Their product is getting exploited for uses that it wasn’t designed for. Are they supposed to ignore that? Are they supposed to just leave the feature in and go, “Hey guys, cut that shit out”?

And needless to say, we are talking about Apple here. The company where every move they make is followed by a flood of criticism, no matter what the decision is. Faster machines? Well, they aren’t cheap enough. New OS X upgrade with tons of new features? Well, shit, we shouldn’t have to pay $130 for it, we should pay $20 instead. Losing support for my machine from 1996? Those bastards, how dare they. Won’t get Quartz Extreme to run on my Rage IIc with 2MB VRAM? I hate Apple, I’m going to go buy a PC.

This isn’t a forced upgrade, although I would imagine things will break as much as Apple can make them break if you’re still using 4.0 – which isn’t very much. You can’t stream on a LAN between 4.0 and 4.0.1. Maybe somehow they can disable the IMS for 4.0 users – but to the people that are really fighting this upgrade (the ones who quite possibly might’ve been abusing the internet streaming), is that really going to matter?

I think that given all the options, Apple made the only decision they really could – and I’m not going to begrudge them of that just because they took away a feature I barely use.